THE PERSUADABLES: “Nothing Is What It Seems”

A review of “The Great Hack” ( @thegreathackdoc on @netflix) in the subject’s own words.

1/ “It began with a dream of a connected world.”- @profcarroll digital rights activist

2/ “These digital traces of ourselves are being mined into a trillion dollar a year industry... we are now the commodity...no one bothered to read the terms and conditions.”- @profcarroll

3/ “We saw the fallout of our filtered realities in the 2016 election...the real world became a deeply divided wreckage site.”- @profcarroll

4/ As Professor Carroll sought clues to what was feeding our fears and tearing our world apart, a scribe for the Trump campaign offered clues to the @BBCNews with a tour of Project Alamo, revealing where Cambridge Analytica had been embedded and referencing its “secret sauce.”

5/ Professor Carroll teamed up with mathematician @podehaye who deduced that U.S. voter data was processed by Cambridge Analytica’s parent company SCL in the U.K. and thus Carroll’s profound quest on behalf of digital privacy rights was born.

6/ “To God be the glory” noted Ted Cruz on the campaign trail, as his profile was being boosted by Cambridge Analytica. Another candidate, however, had Russian military intelligence on his side and Cambridge Analytica soon switched teams.

7/ After the U.S. election, a former CA exec said: “We could see the path to becoming a billion dollar company. We were on top of the world.” Enter @carolecadwalla, a feature writer turned investigative reporter after a “creepy” intervu tipped her off to big trouble with big data

8/ Carole’s tenacious reporting turned up the brave whistleblower @chrisinsilico who described Cambridge Analytica as “a full service propaganda machine.”

9/ @chrisinsilico:“It was a grossly unethical experiment. You’re playing with the psychology of an entire country without their consent or awareness.”

As it applies to the democratic process, he said: “If you’re caught cheating, you lose your medal.

“I’m incredibly remorseful.”

10/ THE GREAT EXPERIMENT: The film highlights former Cambridge Analytica director Brittany Kaiser, who noted: “Data surpassed oil in its value. Data is the most valuable asset on earth. These companies are valuable because they have been exploiting people’s assets.”

11/ Kaiser, who worked for President Obama’s campaign before taking a job with Cambridge Analytica, said she was surprised to discover “the Trump campaign HQ is a reality TV set” as seen on “The Apprentice.”

12/ Kaiser said a friend introduced her to Cambridge Analytica exec Alexander Nix who gave her his card and said: “Let me get you drunk and steal your secrets.”

13/ THE PERSUADABLES: “The bulk of our resources went into targeting those whose minds we thought we could change—‘the Persuadables.’ The ones that mattered were in swing states. Our creative team designed personalized content to trigger those individuals. We bombarded them.”-BK

14/ Kaiser said “the Persuadables” were bombarded on every available platform and by every available means until “they saw the world the way we wanted them to... until they voted for our candidate.”

15/ As @carolecadwalla investigated Cambridge Analytica’s ties to http://Leave.EU  the lies piled up. “What the f*ck?!” she said. “How can they keep denying it?! This is nuts... It was exactly the same time http://Leave.EU  started posting horrible videos of me.”

16/ One misogynistic video featured violence against Carole set to the Russian national anthem using a scene from the film “Airplane” as a template.

17/ “It is this sort of visceral thing, living with this disinformation and this propaganda every single day and feeling the effects of it and knowing that it does work and does have an impact in real life whether people believe that or not.”- @carolecadwalla

18/ “THE DATA WARS HAVE BEGUN”: Re-watching Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate testimony was painful.

19/ After it broke Cambridge Analytica scraped tens of millions of Facebook profiles, during Kaiser’s testimony in front of @CommonsCMS she said: “The methodology was considered a weapon—weapons grade communications tactics.” She urged people to possess their data like property.

20/ “Psyops—psychological operations—is a term the military uses to describe what to do in warfare... so you either bomb the sh*t out of a village or you try to use other techniques to persuade them. SCL started out of a military contractor.”- @carolecadwalla

21/ “The real game-changer was they started using information warfare in elections,” said Carole, who noted they refined their persuasion and voter suppression techniques in developing countries before detonating in Britain and America.

22/ BUSTED: Among the more painful moments in the film was re-watching the @Channel4News undercover sting of Cambridge Analytica execs as they boasted about the “Crooked Hillary” campaign. “The O’s were a handcuff.”

23/ “We put information into the bloodstream of the internet and watch it grow: no branding, unattributable, untrackable...” And so “Crooked Hillary” was a lie built by a military contractor using information warfare to sway an election.

24/ And so it came to pass, a militarized propaganda machine that dreamed of billions, went bankrupt. Its COO/CFO had this to say: “There was always gonna be a Cambridge Analytica. It just sucks for me it was Cambridge Analytica.”

25/ GUARDIANS: Watching the scene where @carolecadwalla has a meeting with her newsroom colleagues—all women—was a moment for this journo vet. A beautiful moment.

26/ As @profcarroll case winds thru the British legal system, it becomes a criminal matter: “They’re not respecting the law. We’re now in uncharted waters. Their model has the potential to affect a slice of the population—only about 70,000 voters in 3 states decided the election”

27/ “This is about the integrity of our democracy. It’s about our national sovereignty... Facebook has been obstructive in its effort to help British Parliament investigate the matter.”- @carolecadwalla

28/ Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, decided not to sit on the sidelines of history and urged the media giant to fix its privacy fails. “My fingerprints are all over this thing. I felt really guilty. I just wanted to be able to sleep at night.”

29/ In his testimony in front of @CommonsCMS Alexander Nix used right-wing psyops rather than admitting truth, blaming the “liberal media” instead of his company’s criminal behaviors. Funny how whenever RW tossers are caught behaving badly, they resort to the ol corny standards.

30/ As @carolecadwalla learns Brittany Kaiser met with Julian Assange and traveled to Russia while employed by Cambridge Analytica, Kaiser said she’s “rethinking her choices.”

31/ “BRITISH ELECTION LAWS NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE”: “We literally cannot have a free and fair election in this country because of Facebook and the tech giants who are completely unaccountable. Sounds apocalyptic but we can see authoritarian governments on the rise.”- @carolecadwalla

32/ “We can see authoritarian governments are on the rise and they are all using these politics of hate and fear on Facebook...We also know that the Russian government was using Facebook tools in the U.S.”- @carolecadwalla

33/ DIVIDE AND CONQUER: As Carole cites the evidence of Russian intelligence creating Facebook “Black Live Matters” memes, pages and protests, she said: “It’s about stoking fear and hate to turn the country against itself.”

34/ @paulhilder: “We are all responsible—the question is: what to do with that responsibility. Can we embrace it.”

35/ As the bankrupt Cambridge Analytica pleaded guilty for failing to comply with a U.K. media regulator's order to release the info it had on @profcarroll, he sent @carolecadwalla a text: “We always knew they were a criminal enterprise, Carole...now it’s, official?”

36/ 5000 DATA POINTS: There’s a brief cameo by Steve Bannon, who helped found Cambridge Analytica and was its V.P., where he boasts of giving the company its name. CA, a “full-service propaganda machine” noted @chrisinsilico boasted of having 5000 data points on every U.S. voter.

37/ “By the time my daughter is 18, she’ll have 70,000 data points defining her, and currently, she has no rights. But the battle continues.”- @profcarroll

38/ Addressing the tech bros in Silicon Valley in a @TEDTalks, @carolecadwalla said: “Is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism? Is this what we want? To sit back and play with our phones as this darkness falls.”

39/ “Our dignity as humans is at stake... the hardest part in all of this is these wreckage sites and crippling divisions begin with the manipulation of one individual and another and another...”- @profcarroll

40/ DATA RIGHTS ARE THE NEW HUMAN RIGHTS: The films ends on a footnote about Trump’s digital campaign manager noting the 5.9 million virtual ads they ran on Facebook in 2016. Hillary Clinton ran 66,000. Ms. Clinton had truth on her side. Trump had Cambridge Analytica and Russia.

41/ CODA: In spring of 2017, I diffused a tense situation in a parking lot between an elderly man and a woman who stole a spot he’d been waiting on. I told him to let it go. It wasn’t worth it. I’d been doing a lot of that post-election. Things were tense and people were heated.

42/ He was in his 90s and told me all about wars he’d lived through and summarized the presidents of each decade. He looked at me before driving off and said: “We’ve never been here before. This is a different kind of war. These are different kinds of bombs.” I knew what he meant

43/ The next morning in my inbox I received an invitation from @MoveOn to write my own petition and so I did. I sat on my balcony at dawn and typed some words on my phone, demanding to see all the Project Alamo and Cambridge Analytica ads. I wrote it like a Mark Twain manifesto.

44/ Seems like a lifetime ago. The petition was signed by 100s of people all over the world, demanding to see every dark ad microtargeted by the Trump campaign to voters in swing states to persuade and suppress. Here’s one of the original petition tweets: https://twitter.com/heidi_cuda/status/854824622901960704?s=21

45/ I wrote: “Cyber Mind Crimes are War Crimes, we've just never experienced Big Data enabling corruption of this magnitude. It's the first time a cyber misinformation war was waged on American soil, affecting the outcome of a presidency, which many Americans feel is not legit.”

46/ A man from England signed the petition and wrote these words: “You have here an opportunity to make a stand for ethics and a set of values in defence of a non-totalitarian or repressive regime..Please use it wisely as eventually your decision will be judged by history.”

47/ That gent connected me with @carolecadwalla and told me his country had suffered the same wreckage.

This platform can move mountains—for good and evil.

We are soldiers in an undeclared war on democratic nations—an invasion of the mind snatchers. Stay in truth and push on.

48/ EPILOGUE: I do this work because people will read headlines, blurbs and listen to soundbites. Dense reports, not so much. Documentaries, maybe.

@thegreathackdoc is a profoundly important document of our times, as is @ActMeasuresDoc & @zembla docs on Trump’s dubious friends.

49/ THE GREAT HACKS: The propaganda machines will continue, under different names and in the dark of night. Same players, same lack of ethics, different names. Who’s watching. https://twitter.com/heidi_cuda/status/986971134389174272?s=21

50/ THINGS FALL APART: More reading for the intrepid here. Of buttressing value to @thegreathackdoc is #12, in which @KeirGiles explains how Russia targets nations with electronic and information warfare and nothing is as it seems. The centre cannot hold. https://twitter.com/heidi_cuda/status/1143177699025809409?s=21

51/ BOT BY MERCER: Robert Mercer, a computer scientist who used wealth gained from super secret hedge fund to seed Cambridge Analytica (despite shady ties to shady ops) which leant its data to Brexit bros and data accessed in Russia, which was overthrowing democratic govts. Huh

52/ After watching @thegreathackdoc multiple times, I have no doubt data-thieving villains worked in unison. Those super secret hedge funds are so curious. https://twitter.com/heidi_cuda/status/1157428193583755264?s=21